


This sorrow will one day prove to be for your good

by orphan_account



Series: There will be a fish [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Pre-Canon, mythology meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 22:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes when he’s sitting there thinking about what the point of the hippokampoi are, Stiles imagines what his mom would say, thinks about how sure she was that the Phoenix meant there is some good in every bad, that life is cyclical and that means death is as well. She was lying to herself, he thinks, and he decides that’s okay. So sometimes he lies to himself, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This sorrow will one day prove to be for your good

“You know the best thing about this bestiary, Stiles?” his mom asks him. Her face is gaunt and the bags under her eyes have gotten bigger every day for weeks now; at this point, she looks like she’s being eaten by how tired she is. He supposes she is, really. If her body were more rested, maybe the cancer wouldn’t be eating its way through her chest. 

“Besides that it’s awesome and old and it has all the little gold-leafed pages?” Stiles asks, and his mom smiles and he takes a snapshot in his head and thinks: Mom, happy. He doesn’t want to think about why he does it. He’s not ready. (He’ll never be ready, but he’s really not ready. He’s twelve, and his mom has been sick for almost two years, and she could be sick forever as long as – ).

“Every story in it is true,” she says. Stiles frowns, because he’s definitely old enough at this point to know that there aren’t catoblepas and centaurs all over the place. 

“No it’s not,” Stiles says. “You and Dad only told me a million times when I was little that there are no such things as basilisks.” His mom’s smile is small but clear, and she pats the spot next to her on the hospital bed. Stiles climbs up without hesitation because she’s been sick so long he’s gotten over being too old for snuggling or story time. It makes him feel better and she says it makes her feel better, too, and they don’t deny themselves things that make them happy anymore. 

“Things can be true in different ways,” she says. “Pick one, and I’ll tell you what’s true about it.”

“Phoenix,” he says, thinking about the next Harry Potter book that he and his dad have been reading at night when Stiles sleeps in his bed. Stiles gets nightmares and his dad has insomnia, anyway, so he gets to stay up later than he ever has before and doesn’t even get into a little bit of trouble. If he were eight, he would think it’s awesome. And sometimes it still is, because his dad is awesome, but. He’s – old enough to know that something’s really wrong, is the thing. He would go to bed at 8 every night for the rest of his life if – 

“Alright,” she says, flipping through the book. The movement is practiced and smooth; she knows every page, every story, has read them all for herself and for Stiles. Stiles already knows what a Phoenix is, just like he knows leucrocotae and chimera, but he watches her raptly anyhow and listens close. “Birds derive their first beginnings from others of their kind. But one alone renews and re-begets itself – the Phoenix of Assyria, which feeds not upon seeds or verdure but the oils of balsam and the tears of frankincense. This bird, when five long centuries of life have passed, with claws and beak unsullied, builds a nest high on a lofty swaying palm; and lines the nest with cassia and spikenard and golden myrrh and shreds of cinnamon, and settled there at ease and, so embowered in spicy perfumes, ends his life's long span,” his mom draws in a breath, and Stiles buries in close to her, quiet and breathing. She rubs her thumb against his buzz cut as she picks up again. “Then from his father's body is reborn a little Phoenix, so they say, to live the same long years; in this way father and son are one within the bird. When time has built his strength with power to raise the weight, he lifts the nest – the nest his cradle and his father's tomb – as love and duty prompt, from that tall palm and carries it across the sky to reach the Sun's great city, and before the doors of the Sun's holy temple lays it down.” Stiles is quiet for a moment as his mom finishes, skimming a few pages and nodding to herself, absorbed. Her voice is rich and warm and feels like hot chocolate, and when he was little he used to listen to the lull of her voice instead of her words. He listened to her words today, but he isn’t sure what they mean.

“So why’s that the truth?” he asks. 

“Well,” she says, “maybe we can’t live forever. Not in our bodies. But maybe we can in someone else’s. Like you have grandpa’s eyes. That means at least a little bit of him is alive in there, right?”

“I guess,” Stiles says. 

“But Stiles,” his mom says, and she pulls him up against her side and slides her arms over his shoulders. “Here’s what I really want you to remember about Phoenixes. I think the real truth is if we don’t die, other people can’t live. And there’s good in the worst of life, always. Even if it’s death. Every cliché you’ve ever heard about silver linings and the darkest before the dawn and when one door closes, another one opens? It’s all true. You remember that, okay?”

Stiles nods and tucks his face into her neck, trying to find her lemon-home smell, but he only gets a whiff of hospital. He has to fight the urge to push her away, to throw a fit and say _I want my mom back, I want my mom back, I miss her so much, please come home, I don’t want the only thing that smells like you to be your closet._ “I love you,” he says instead, muffled, because being selfish doesn’t help her. His eyes are wet but he doesn’t move to shove his tears away, just scoots in even closer to his mom and feels her warm and soothing and there, and he does love her, but he’s not sure he believes her. 

“I love you too, kid.”

\---

She dies a few months later, and they burn her because she wants to be kept with them instead of stuck away somewhere, rotting. Stiles sticks his hands in her ashes when they split her up, part for their house and part for his Aunt Jen. He thinks of the Phoenix rising from the ashes, and he’s surer than ever that she’s not coming back. That maybe some parts of myth are true, but that – that is a lie. 

It doesn’t stop his single-minded focus on myth, though. Even though there are lies in the bestiary and the worst one of all kept him from his mother, Stiles clings to the old book in the weeks after her death. He learns it all, every single page, and he does more research in addition to the bestiary, putting sticky notes in the corners with references to other books. He fills the living room with Ovid and Herodotus and Homer and Aelian and Philostratus and Hesiod and finds truth everywhere he can. Sometimes when he’s sitting there thinking about what the point of the hippokampoi are, Stiles imagines what his mom would say, thinks about how sure she was that the Phoenix meant there is some good in every bad, that life is cyclical and that means death is as well. She was lying to herself, he thinks, and he decides that’s okay. So sometimes he lies to himself, too. 

Only after she lied to him about the good in every bad, he can’t believe it anymore. Bad is just bad, and good is just good, and neither of those things necessarily come and go around because everyone completely misunderstands karma anyway.

Stiles loves more fiercely and protectively and loyally after she dies, because once was enough. Nothing bad will happen to Scott and his dad and Aunt Jen and Lydia if he can help it, nothing. Some things are more precious than others. 

No one ever mentions the new water filters Stiles buys and puts obsessively everywhere, all over the house and Scott’s house and tries to give Lydia and hounds Aunt Jen about, just like no one mentions how he literally throws himself in front of them to keep them from entering construction zones. When the house is repainted and Stiles tries to keep his dad out but he goes in anyway to grab some clothes and Stiles has a panic attack, his dad stands next to him and puts his hand on his shoulders. Stiles crashes into his chest and his dad pulls him into a hug and whispers for him to breathe while everything is too-bright and no one is safe, dad, no, no no no no no no, _mom_. He’s too out of it to feel his dad’s heartbeat, almost faster than his own, but when Stiles pulls himself out his dad is crying.

In that way, it isn’t really a choice to make more of an effort to deal with his mom’s death instead of just being freaked out by it. He wants them to be safe, and they can’t be if he has panic attacks whenever anything even mildly concerning happens to them. He can’t spend days on the internet looking up carcinogens and thinking, maybe if Dad had made her leave when they repainted, maybe if she hadn’t drank so much from her plastic water bottle, maybe if she hadn’t taken those drugs or cooked with the tap water. H e can’t sit in his room and dream up all the ways he could take everything that might have killed her away from everyone else he loves. Even though he wants to. But they want him to be okay more than they want to live, and it’s a feeling he understands. So that’s where he puts his energies next: being okay. And mostly, he is.

Four years pass like the four before, except his mom isn’t there and the bestiary is. It’s a crappy trade. Stiles hates it. He misses her every day and no matter what good things happen, it doesn’t make up for the part of him he reserved for her. Still, he’s mostly okay. And he figures that’s what counts.

So of course, he prods Scott into the forest when his dad mentions a dead body, and everything – absolutely everything – goes to complete shit.

**Author's Note:**

> So maybe this is the first part of a five-part fic series about Stiles being a unicorn and Derek being a phoenix (with a side order of Hephaestus), except it's not crack. Basically that means it's mythological meta.
> 
> Title (of the fic and of the series) come from Ovid quotes.
> 
> also wow good lord it's been a LONG ASS TIME since I posted fic.


End file.
